“Hannah Arendt” and the Glorification of Thinking

There’s a device in historical drama that I’m especially fond of, in which events of great import are traced to the small, daily actions from which they arose. (One great recent example is the HBO drama “Cinema Verite,” about the making of the 1973 TV series “An American Family.”) The disproportion stokes amazement at the way the world works and, overleaping the particulars of the story, giddily induces a general sense of wonder. That’s why I came to Margarethe von Trotta’s bio-pic “Hannah Arendt” (now playing at Film Forum) with great expectations. The story concerns the writing of, and controversy around, the reporter and philosopher Hannah Arendt’s book “Eichmann in Jerusalem,” about the trial of the Nazi war criminal, from its origin as a series of articles for this magazine to the defense that Arendt mounted on its behalf and the personal price that it extracted from her.

The movie, unfortunately, doesn’t do Arendt justice. Instead of giving small gestures and daily labors grand scope, “Hannah Arendt”—which stars Barbara Sukowa in the title role—diminishes them with hagiography and a tone-deaf attempt to depict quotidian life in a grand sentimental mode. The movie balances Arendt’s apparently very happy marriage to Heinrich Blücher (played by Axel Milberg) and her friendship with Mary McCarthy (Janet McTeer) not with the turmoil of a regular life from which the extraordinary emerges but, rather, with the gleaming nobility of the life of the mind. Von Trotta preserves Arendt’s dignity to the point of dehumanization, depriving the protagonist of any trait that could render her ridiculous.

In one aspect, the movie is worse than ridiculous: its use of footage of the trial of Adolf Eichmann, as seen by Arendt on television screens in Israel. The mystery, ambiguity, vastness, complexity, and horror in the black-and-white images of that trial seem to escape not only Arendt (which I doubt was the intended dramatic effect) but von Trotta as well, making her simplistic, unquestioning representation of the story’s historical events all the more offensive.

A movie that depicts intellectuals isn’t necessarily intellectual. There’s more real cognition at work and on display in Shane Carruth’s “Upstream Color” and Terrence Malick’s “To the Wonder”—neither of which depict people who make a living from intellectual pursuits—than in this movie, which comes off as a sort of soft-core philosophical porn. “Hannah Arendt” titillates the craving for the so-called intellectual life while actually offering little intellectual substance. A. O. Scott, in his review of the movie in the Times, writes that “the work of thinking is notoriously difficult to show” and praises the film for the way that it does so: “In this case, it looks a lot like smoking, with intervals of typing, pacing or staring at the ceiling from a daybed in the study.”

Actually, the work of thinking is easy, almost effortless, to show—it’s what almost every movie is made of. Here is what it looks like when a person thinks; here is what it looks like; here, too, and (thanks to Stanley Cavell) here; but also, here and here. Thinking is something that everyone does, like breathing. Some are particularly adept at it; others do it with difficulty or suffer impairment. The movie’s sanctimonious depiction of “thinking” as something greater than what the regular run of people do is one of the signs of its artistic failure.

And then there’s “Eichmann in Jerusalem.” Even without von Trotta’s film, the book would be a subject of discussion at the moment, thanks to Claude Lanzmann’s new film, “The Last of the Unjust,” which premièred last week at the Cannes Film Festival (I haven’t seen it yet). It is based on his 1975 interviews with Benjamin Murmelstein, who, as the last head of the Jewish Council in Theresienstadt, worked under Eichmann and put into practice the policies dictated for the camp, including the deportation of inmates to Auschwitz. After the war, he was harshly criticized by some Jewish leaders, who considered him a Nazi collaborator. Lanzmann has described his film (as in this recent interview with Annette Lévy-Willard, in Libération), as an attempt to “show these so-called Jewish collaborators weren’t collaborators. They never wanted to kill Jews, they didn’t share the Nazis’ ideology, they were powerless unfortuntes. We see clearly who the killers were.”

In discussing his own film, Lanzmann also criticizes Arendt’s book; he repudiates both her critique of the Jewish Councils and her book’s key idea, the “banality of evil.” If Eichmann was, as Arendt asserted, a bland and “thoughtless” functionary who organized deportations with no evil intent but, rather, just to follow orders, then his crime would be no greater than that of Jews who worked under his command and were merely following his orders.

Von Trotta’s movie gives Arendt the bombastic and impassioned last word on the “banality of evil.” Regarding the angry response that Arendt sparked, with “Eichmann in Jerusalem,” by accusing Jews of complicity in their own murder, von Trotta presents the author as correct in her claims, though unsympathetic and lacking compassion in making them. As von Trotta depicts it, Arendt’s fault is one of style and of tone, not of substance—the writer is presented as too frank, perhaps even too cold, but absolutely right.

In “Eichmann in Jerusalem,” Arendt insists that the book is a “trial report.” Yet, as Arendt admits and as von Trotta’s film shows, she only attended part of the trial in Jerusalem, and relied heavily on trial transcripts and other printed documents, and this distance shows in the book. Arendt makes the mistake of taking Eichmann at his word. She traces the implications of his statements, his rhetoric, and his turns of phrase, but she does so from the point of view of a philosopher, not of a journalist. That may be why she concludes that Eichmann is “banal” and that his deeds are the work of his “sheer thoughtlessness.” Von Trotta makes the same mistake as Arendt: she sets up “thinking” as a special category of activity, and distinguishes Arendt’s crowd of circumspect intellectuals from the run of faceless bureaucrats who do their jobs with no sense of their place in the world.

This is what I take to be Arendt’s ultimate target in “Eichmann in Jerusalem,”: she shoots through Eichmann in order to strike at contemporary Western society and at modern technocracy, with its presumptive detachment from its intellectual, humanistic, or philosophical roots. Arendt implies that if Eichmann had lived a rich intellectual life he would have been in a better position to resist his instrumentalization in a dehumanizing bureaucratic machine—or would be fully morally responsible for his part in it. That’s why Arendt, in her book, takes such pains to filter evil intent—any actual sense of anti-Semitism—from Eichmann’s persona. She takes the word of the accused, defending himself, in an Israeli court, against charges of participating in the extermination of Jews by claiming not to be an anti-Semite, at face value.

Arendt cites “the German text of the taped police examination” of Eichmann as “a veritable gold mine for a psychologist,” but Arendt herself is no psychologist, not even at this banal level. Nor is she a particularly analytical historian. In her chapters on the deportations (the “ten pages” about the Jewish Councils, as cited in von Trotta’s movie, that sparked the controversy), she doesn’t note the crucial distinction between German-occupied countries (such as Hungary and Greece), where Eichmann successfully established Jewish Councils to carry out his policies, and ones (such as Denmark and Bulgaria) where he didn’t. For that matter, she fails to see that the conduct of Jewish leaders under Eichmann also provided a “gold mine for a psychologist”—she never takes into consideration the mind-bending fear that Jews in Nazi-occupied countries faced, and their desperate desire to preserve a sense of order that might save them from the ambient madness.

Arendt charges Eichmann with a “lack of imagination,” but take this sentence:

The original deadline of February, 1942, could not be met, because Jews were able to escape from Croatia to Italian-occupied territory, but after the Badoglio coup Hermann Krumey, another of Eichmann’s men, arrived in Zagreb, and by the fall of 1943 thirty thousand Jews had been deported to the killing centers.

Even the phrase “Jews were able to escape from Croatia to Italian-occupied territory” implies an entire novel (one such as Irène Némirovsky’s “Suite Française”) or a meticulous work of history. One of the great things about “Bloodlands: Europe Between Hilter and Stalin,” the historian Timothy Snyder’s colossal and agonizing work about the mass murders committed by the two regimes, is that it draws on firsthand accounts to extract the hidden and horrific core of personal experience from the summaries and abstractions of historical study.

The best and most enduringly valuable aspect of “Eichmann in Jerusalem” is its account of the Holocaust as its events accrete around Eichmann. Although Arendt’s view of Eichmann is utterly externalized, she follows him through an extraordinary series of activities, from his signing up with the S.S. to his role in the “resettlement,” deportation, and murder of Europe’s Jews. At its best, “Eichmann in Jerusalem” is a modernistic nonfiction novel, a companion to the works of Alain Robbe-Grillet and Claude Simon, in which psychology and inwardness are effaced in favor of mechanical exposition of bare facts.

The end of Arendt’s sentence, above—“by the fall of 1943 thirty thousand Jews had been deported to the killing centers”—dispatches the victims with a solipsistic, emotionally blank, anti-literary mechanism. The book is filled with such monstrous abstractions: “The extermination program that was started in the autumn of 1941 ran, as it were, on two altogether different tracks.” Yet her meticulous pileup of facts has a terrifying, implacable, unbearable power. The cumulative effect, then, of “Eichmann in Jerusalem” is overwhelming, incommensurable, alien to human experience. As such, the book reflects the absolute darkness of the Holocaust, its unassimilable otherness. From her philosophical, historical, and journalistic failures, Arendt created an accidental literary masterwork despite itself.

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